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Comment by starwind | Hacker News Reader

The Romans were also up against some adversaries who fought desperately to not be Roman. Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman ~citizen~ person if they were willing to die than submit. I’m sure honor had something to do with it, but the general trend seen in the archaeological record in the Middle East and North America is that people got shorter and had more teeth problems as they settle down into civilization than when they were hunter/gatherers or lived in settled communities for no more than a few years before hitting the proverbial road again. I’m sure the same thing applies in Europe during the Roman age.

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> Somewhat off topic, but I’ll bring it up anyway, it must have been better to have lived in a Gallic or Germanic or Iberian tribe than to have lived as a Roman citizen if they were willing to die than submit.

Peoples conquered by Rome did not become Roman citizens with the rights and privileges associated with that, generally.

In the graded levels of rights in Roman law, depending on whether they were just conquered or had treaty status, they were two or three steps below citizens of Rome.

Good call. I mean "citizen" in the general sense like "person who lives under Rome" but wasn't thinking that "citizen" had a very specific meaning in the Roman context. I edited my answer

The reason these tribes usually resist isn't because the Roman lifestyle is bad, it's because the Romans ran the biggest slaving empire in the world. Those slaves that does everything in Rome, they get them from waging war. So strictly-speaking, there is a change that they won't even get to be a "person" if they submit to Rome, they would become a slave. So would their wives and children.

If anything, a lot of people want to be Roman citizens after they have tried it. There is a whole war in Italy called the "Social War" over extending formal, normal citizenship to Roman allies.

Where Gallic, Germanic, and Iberian tribes actually hunter/gatherers? By that time I thought Europe and the Mediterranean were dominated by farming cultures.

The take-home impression I got from reading through those two Cesar wars is that the legions were almost as dependent on local grain available to steal (ready to take in granary, or just ready to harvest, doesn't really matter) as trains are dependent on rails. I assume that except for bumping into an adequate rival in the east, they just gobbled up the entire "wheatosphere", quickly running out of steam (and, with a few notable exceptions, out of motivation) whatever they ran into hunter/gatherer economies.

But if there’s lots of grain to steal, doesn’t that indicate they’re not in hunter/gatherer territory?

Central and Western Europe have been farmed for thousands of years by that point. Farming in Southern France/Iberia was already well established around 7000 years BP (before present). By the time of Romans, the hunter-gatherer's lifestyle was wholly displaced from the area, with only minuscule fraction of resident population engaging in it, at best.

See e.g. First Farmers of Europe, https://www.amazon.com/First-Farmers-Europe-Evolutionary-Per...

After all the grain has been stolen, you are in for a rough year where hunter/gathering might reappear + cannibalism. Imagine it less as a "civilization appears" moment, and more a "metal locusts from outer space eat previous civilization and leaf behind large slave farms after years of famine.

That's what I meant: I take it as a given that if they were successfully invaded, they must have left the hunter/gatherer state behind, likely by a considerable margin.

Sorry, misread your comment

They were farming some crops but wouldn't have been as dependent on them as Romans would have been and would have had a lot more variety including meat in their diets

Caesar in his Bellum Gallicum -- the gauls had cities (that Caesar's army had to build siege engines to take) and kings. The regions had millions of people living there. In one tribe alone (Atuatici), Caesar, to punish them sold 53,000 people from a single tribe into slavery. This isn't the entire population, just what he could round up in a single town.

I don't think small tribes of wandering hunters with small farming plots can sustain that many people. Caesar ran around and laid sieges to these things regularly during the Gaullic Wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppidum

The good farmland was farmed, but this left a lot of hillcountry which was kind of marginal for that purpose.

You might want to read the book

The Art of Not Being Governed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

which discusses in some detail the advantages of living in "marginally" farmable hillcountry.

Gauls had better metallurgy than Romans.

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